Backgammon is the oldest known board game, with a history spanning thousands of years.

It is ever-popular in the Middle East and Asia, but in the rest of the world it swings in and out of fashion.

In the last century it enjoyed something of a revival in the 1920s, when the doubling cube was introduced to increase the skill element and enhance the game’s gambling potential, but the decade it had the most worldwide impact was the 1970s.

Big-money tournaments were set up, a world championship was established, backgammon clubs sprouted up everywhere (there were even backgammon restaurants) and a whole publishing industry was founded to satisfy the demand for books and magazines about the game.

Although interest waned in the 1980s, it is on the rise again and there’s talk of backgammon following in the footsteps of poker as the next big gambling craze.

Celebrity players include Nicole Kidman and Tobey Maguire, and many of the top poker stars are fans of the game, including Gus Hansen, the Poker World Tour champion.

Such is the popularity of the online game that on the leading backgammon servers, where you can play for fun or real money, there are now monthly tournaments with guaranteed prizes of $100,000.

And the enthusiasm is international, so if you log onto Play65 or Gammonempire at any time of the day or night, you’ll find up to 10,000 people playing simultaneously on thousands of tables. Somewhere in the world it’s always backgammon time.

Chips with everything

Much of the renewed interest in the game stems from its connection with computing technology: not only because backgammon is being packaged as a hot new form of online gaming or because a PC is a tireless and always-available opponent, but because backgammon has become one of the success stories of research into artificial intelligence (AI).

Self-taught backgammon-playing computer programs are so good that they have overturned many of the assumptions previously held about how the game should be played and which are the best moves, especially in the opening phases of the game.

Any player who trains by regularly playing against a backgammon program, using moves suggested by the program itself, can learn to play at levels that were previously attained by only a few top players.

Unlike the top chess-playing computers and computer programs, which tend to use brute-force tree searching and rely on massive amounts of computing power in a hybrid hardware/software platform, any PC can run a world-class backgammon program.

Hydra, which is the world’s most powerful chess-playing computer and has never been beaten, is a cluster computer based on 32 x 3.06GHz Xeon processors, each paired with its own FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) device and capable of evaluating 200 million moves per second.